The Right to be Woke

Plus: Tom Brady and the culture of sore winners.

, and

Feb 11, 2025

Two programming notes for today: At 1 p.m. ET today, JVL will go live on the site with Jim Acosta in the first chat for our pop-up series, WTF 2.0. Jim recently left CNN and has joined the ranks of independent media here on Substack.

And tonight, JVL and Sarah will host the first Founders Town Hall of 2025 at 8:30 p.m. ET. More here. We’ll email a location link to all founders at 4 p.m. ET. Upgrade to a founding membership here if you want to join.

Happy Tuesday.

Reflected in the Potomac River, the exterior of the John F. Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts building is lit up in multiple colors in advance of the annual Kennedy Center Honors on December 1, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Photo by J. David Ake/Getty Images)

Why We Should Care About Trump’s Kennedy Center Coup

by William Kristol

In the Oval Office yesterday evening, Donald Trump was asked about his takeover of the Kennedy Center. He was unapologetic in defending his abrupt removal of much of the board, his personal assumption of the chairmanship, and his installation of his loyal apparatchik, Ric Grenell, as interim director.

“We took over the Kennedy Center,” Trump said, loud and proud. “It’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.”

I’m aware that his Kennedy Center coup is not the most important of Trump’s offenses in his first three weeks in office. I’m also aware that a little mocking of excessive piety about culture, and a little puncturing of the reverence for those who make up the boards of institutions like the Kennedy Center, isn’t a bad thing.

Still, at the risk of donning the unfashionable mantle of an earnest liberal, I’ll say a word about what Trump has done and said here.

As The Washington Post points out, “the president’s authority to unilaterally reshape the board, install new staff and make himself board chairman is an open question for the public-private institution.” But the fact that the Kennedy Center has a somewhat complicated and ambiguous governance structure—and that no previous president, because of respect for legality or a sense of propriety, had tried this before—of course didn’t cause Trump to hesitate. “We took over the Kennedy Center,” he confidently proclaimed. Trump likes power. He wants power over everything he can plausibly claim power over. And he’ll take power everywhere he can get away with doing so.

The republic will survive this dubious but not terribly consequential claim of presidential power. Still, it’s one small increase in the temperature of the boiling water in which the frog of limited government and the rule of law is being boiled by the Trump administration.

And in justifying what he did, Trump didn’t really invoke presidential power. “We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things . . . I’m going to be chairman of it, and we’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke.”

The appeal was to personal power, to personal willfulness. The royal “We” didn’t like things the Kennedy Center was doing, so “we” took it over.

The grounds of Trump’s dislike of Kennedy Center productions is unclear. On Sunday, Trump acknowledged that he hadn’t actually been to the Kennedy Center in years, or maybe ever. He offered no actual instances of woke programming at the concert hall or the opera house of the theater. Trump did explain that the Center will not host “drag shows, or other anti-American propaganda.”

I’m somewhat dubious that the Kennedy Center is awash in drag shows. I’ve been there many times, and have never encountered one playing in one of the other venues. Among the 2,000 events put on each year, there are, reportedly, a few, which customers can of course choose to patronize or not, as they wish.

As for anti-American propaganda, I’m sure that not every play or opera that’s performed there is 100 percent on board with an unquestioned endorsement of the wealthy, capitalism, the nuclear family, or traditional religion.

Still, I suppose the republic would survive if the Kennedy Center is turned into a boring home for anodyne and edifying productions. There’d be no Measure for Measure, no Cosi fan tutte, no High Noon. But of course we could go see those kind-of-woke works of art elsewhere.

Or could we?

Not if Trump meant what he said in his simple and straightforward way: “There’s no more woke in this country.”

Presumably he doesn’t mean it. Surely he’s not going to tell us all what to watch, how to live, what to see, how to think? Surely he knows that in this nation it’s not the business of the government to extirpate wokeness, or any other point of view. Surely, his casual comment to the contrary notwithstanding, we’re still going to have a free country, with woke and non-woke and anti-woke all coexisting.

I assume we will. But am I being too much of an earnest and alarmed liberal to find Trump’s casual statement just a bit chilling? To detect in Trump’s statement a whiff of the authoritarian, not to say the totalitarian, mindset?

We—that’s Susan and me, not the royal we—saw a production of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio several years ago at the Kennedy Center. One of its many great moments is the English servant Blonde’s defiance of the Ottoman authorities holding her temporarily captive:

“I am an Englishwoman, born to be free,
And defy anyone who would attempt to coerce me!”

We are Americans, born to be free, temporarily burdened with officials who seek to infringe on our liberties. But against Trump’s casual authoritarianism, we can take heart from Blonde’s attachment to the cause of freedom. And that freedom includes—and if I shock my conservative friends or ex-friends by saying this, so be it—the right to be woke.

Sore Winners

by Mona Charen

The Eagles’ victory was greeted joyously in our family. It’s always a high when you (or your team) comes out on top. But in the final minutes of the Super Bowl, as the clock remained stuck on the two minute warning for what felt like 20 minutes (at least for those of us eager to pop the champagne), former quarterback-turned-TV-commentator Tom Brady filled the air time with lugubrious thoughts about how awful it is to be the loser. “To lose a Super Bowl,” he opined, “you never get over it,” adding that he thinks about his losses more than his wins.

Whoa. Whatever happened to You win some, you lose some. What matters is how you play the game? That may be a tough attitude to adopt in the first minutes or hours after a crushing disappointment, but time heals that initial hurt, and a philosophical acceptance of inevitable ups and downs eventually prevails for emotionally healthy people.

I don’t presume to judge Brady’s inner life, but love him or hate him, he’s a legend, with no fewer than seven rings on his fingers—the most of any player in the history of the NFL. Surely all of those wins should soften the disappointment of his three losses? And if the wins don’t salve the disappointment, what about the handsome check? Each player on the winning team gets a bonus of $171,000, but the losers are not forgotten. Each player on the losing side gets $96,000. That’s on top of the average NFL salary of $3.2 million. People who lose out on a job promotion or Pulitzer prize don’t get a consolation check.

Instead of focusing on the “agony of defeat,” Brady could have pointed instead to the handshakes and pats on shoulders that Kansas City Chiefs players were offering to the Eagles. That’s sportsmanship. That’s how grown-ups respond to loss. As someone once said, “Greet victory like a gentleman and defeat like a man.” (I know the saying leaves out women, but the same principle applies.)

The game was also quite clean—no epithets or thrown elbows as far as I could see—and that too should be noticed and praised. Frankly, it’s an accomplishment for men engaged in a game of barely disguised physical combat to keep their tempers.

Consider how many kids were watching the game. Do we want to convey the message that losing a game, even the game, is something you can never get over? What does that tell kids about other setbacks they will inevitably encounter in life?

No one is a winner every time, and losing (a certain president’s tantrum notwithstanding) is not shameful.

Football, and its capstone, the Super Bowl, may well be the one civic function that unites this country—or large swaths of it. Even the commercials can become legendary. Americans with little in common—and these days perhaps harboring roiling suspicions about those who vote differently—can come together over the big game. It’s encouraging for Americans to appreciate the excellence of the athletes, the work of the coaches, and the dedication of the fans. Now more than ever, it’s uplifting and uniting for them to see a hard-fought contest on the field end with handshakes.

We should strive to be the kind of people who demonstrate grace when losing, not who fear that to lose is to be disgraced and despised.

Quick Hits

THAT SOUNDS EFFICIENT: To comply with President Trump’s return-to-work executive order, FEMA—like many other federal agencies—is scrambling to figure out how to fit all its employees into offices that were downsized during and after COVID. There are inevitable complications, like: What if there isn’t enough parking or accessible public transit? What if there aren’t enough bathrooms? What if the office is so overcrowded that I can’t sit with my team anyway and I might as well be working from home?

And what if someone else sits at my desk?

According to FEMA guidance shared with The Bulwark, managers should consider several factors in deciding who gets that contested desk, including seniority, full-time vs. part-time status, or . . . flipping a coin.

Yes, in the name of government efficiency, emergency response experts are now going to spend their time flipping coins to decide who gets to sit where, rather than responding to emergencies.

This raises some questions: Who gets to choose heads or tails? Best two out of three? What if, because of Trump’s other executive order, they run out of pennies to flip? Also, and mainly, where do the losers of the coin flips sit, since they can’t go back home?

THE PRO-CORRUPTION PARTY: Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has directed the Southern District of New York to drop the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams, reports CNN:

The memo cites two reasons for ordering the dismissal: the Justice Department’s opinion that the case has been tainted by publicity and that it is impeding with Adams’ ability to do his job as mayor, including cooperating with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“The pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration,” writes Bove, a former prosecutor in New York himself.

The best part of the move was the extremely serious explanation that Adams was only being prosecuted in the first place because he had been critical of Joe Biden’s immigration policies. Sure . . .

It’s hard to interpret this as anything other than an out-and-out defense of corruption itself. Normally, U.S. attorneys’ offices—especially the Southern District of New York—jealously guard their independence and prerogatives. The point is that justice shouldn’t be intermingled with politics from D.C. But that’s exactly what Bove is doing here, telling SDNY to drop the case because Adams can help the administration on a policy win. In other words: Who cares if the guy is (allegedly) crooked as long as he does what we want?

YOU’RE (NOT) FIRED: One of the many officials President Trump tried to fire in defiance of law was Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger, who leads the independent agency that handles whistleblower complaints and enforces the Hatch Act. Dellinger, unwilling to submit quietly to termination, sued to get his job back—and at least for now, it worked. Politico reports:

Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, issued what she called an “administrative stay” restoring Dellinger to his post through Thursday night. In her brief order, she noted that he was confirmed by the Senate, is in the midst of a five-year term and that federal law dictates he “may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.”
The Justice Department quickly appealed Jackson’s order Monday night.
Jackson said she’d refrain from a formal ruling on Dellinger’s request for a temporary restraining order until the Justice Department submits written arguments in the case, which will be due by noon Tuesday.

Maybe, in the end, Dellinger will lose. But it’s better than rolling over.

ANATOMY OF A CATASTROPHE: In compliance with an executive order, the CIA sent the White House a list of every employee it had hired in the last two years—first names and last initials—with no classification or apparent attempts to protect the information.

Over at Lawfare, professor and CIA veteran Jonathan Fredman explains what a counterintelligence nightmare this is:

Individual items of information can be combined with other data to provide a picture that discloses sensitive intelligence.
For example, enrollment data from academic institutions may be combined with flight data from travel providers, attendance lists from non-governmental conferences, lists of published materials, social media inquiries about medical conditions, and commercially available credit information. Carefully sorted and correlated, this information can enable an adversary to identify individuals with access to sensitive information who may be amenable to approach or recruitment, and to craft the most effective means by which to contact them and develop a relationship. . . .
The apparent statements from unnamed officials to the effect that by providing first names and last initials only, even over unclassified systems, no damage has been done, reflects either ignorance or indifference. Neither enhance the security of our nation.

The first Trump administration was comically lax with classified information, and that doesn’t even include the documents at Mar-a-Lago. Eventually this negligence is going to come back to bite us—hard.